Does it sound too good to be true? Entering a competitive job market such as business analytics is not an easy path. You could feel even more discouraged because you don’t have job experiences in IT or because you don’t hold a degree or an executive MBA in this area. Fear not, you are still eligible for a great career in business analytics and companies are demanding a great number of business professionals that can blend their skills with analytics skills even though you don’t have prior experience!

Without going too further in the past, business analytics training was all about sifting through data of corporate databases, downloading the data into a desktop spreadsheet tool such as Excel, and creating pie charts, bar charts, columnar reports. “The tedium of the process generates challenges for our business partners, who might run many different types of promotions with both flat and tiered offer structures, but are still expected to rapidly turn around the results of their efforts,” said John Stanisic, manager of customer and marketing analytics for Points, a company that provides analytics tools for business loyalty programs and on the other side offers the end customer the ability to manage the loyalty points they earn.

Thanks to a business analytics certification even non-IT people can manage big data without losing weeks or even months of business hours. This is the answer to a big knowledge gap that people without an engineering background are filling up quickly, thanks also to the skills they developed in their past job experiences.

Let’s dive into some solid statistics now. With a simple research on business analyst course, you can find out by yourself that at the moment there is a huge demand for business analysts. There are more than 26000 open positions for this job highlighted by Google alone. What if you could enroll in a business analytics certification and find yourself within 6 months in a brand new position, with an even increased salary? And yes, this could become a reality within this year if you act quickly.

Business analytics is such a multidimensional role within the realm of big data analytics because you have to deal with the IT department as well as the customers. Having programming skills is not central in the business analyst role (as you can find out in a business analyst training), since providing soft skills and knowing how to analyze data is much more important than taking on the job that belongs to IT engineers and programmers. In a business analyst course, you won’t be bothered with any programming at all. Your main requirement will be understanding, developing, managing, and functional testing. So as an entry level business analyst in a business analyst training you have to master 4 business analytics skills. Let’s see what they are.

The first skill you want to hone is requirement analysis and modeling. These techniques and processes are related to the core IT processes. This skill may need a learning curve for professional with no prior job experience in IT. Which is why you should take a business analyst course (in Bangalore you will find plenty of them). Don’t be discouraged by it because that’s one of the first things you will learn in a high-quality business analyst course in India.

A break-up of these skills are as follows:

– SDLC & Requirements understanding (User Stories, Use cases etc)

– Process Modelling (Activity diagrams & flow chart)

– Data Modelling using E-R diagrams

– Developing requirements specifications (SRS, Backlogs etc)

Another crucial skill you want to get the grips of in a business analytics training is functional testing. Functional testing is the last step before a software is delivered to the customer for acceptance testing. This is the part where you have to interact with a customer to gather their needs and observations. So this stage of the process requires you to make sure the software can match the standards of your customers and can meet or go beyond their expectations.

When it comes to functional testing you have to foresee every possible scenario where your product could be employed. At every point of the customer’s journey, the interaction between them and your product has to run smoothly. There must be no mistakes on your part.

Talking about the customer’s journey, as a business analyst, it is of paramount importance that you understand how your customer behaves and interacts with your end product. Gathering all this knowledge will require some time while at the same time you keep making more and more tests. For non-IT professionals, this is an advantage because you have already gained this skill in previous jobs. It can’t be said the same for programmers or IT engineers.

Finally, you have to get a deeper understanding of how to communicate with your customers and your development team as well. These two parties don’t talk the same language, so you play the part of an intermediary between these two worlds.

Going from one job environment to another which is completely different from the previous one is no easy task. And yet you have great chances to succeed. It takes courage, perseverance and the will to study a new skill set, and you will be on your way to becoming a well-rounded business analyst.